Mister Peejay:akula: But then again, the Ohio class is now 15 years old for the newest ship in the class... I imagine they may not be as hard to find as they once were. It looks like we aren't anywhere close to a replacement design for those.

IIRC, the area of detection for an Ohio is almost the size of the hull, so the only way to catch it on passive sonar is to have your ear up against it. So we have that going for us, which is nice.

/trying to find the quote where the soon-to-be-dead political officer said "Ours is better.", failing

It's not just the mechanical part of silencing, there's also the operational side of it. Slower speeds, patrolling in the middle of nowhere (with at random course changes) and planning housekeeping evolutions to coincide with each other to minimize detection to a specific time and place of your choosing (followed by a series of counter-detection maneuvers to make sure that you are not being followed while clearing the datum of the housekeeping of course). If you give a boat an operational area with a "Box" of say 200 by 200 miles and move it say 20-40 miles a day in a set direction the CO can pick and choose where he will be inside that box. That's why not even the president knows where the boats (and more importantly the missiles) are. It's inherent to the overall anti-detection strategy that we use.

The only reason to even use a set operational area "Box" is to prevent collisions between 2 boats too silent to detect one another and with submarines you can stack the operation area "Boxes" so that there's a transit layer below the patrol layer and you can even make it so that there are small (call it 2 miles by 2 miles) "Dead zones" where a boomer cannot go into within their "Box" so that transiting boats below them can come up to periscope depth to make radio contact or whatever else they need to do (emergencies are always the exception of course). By being consistent in using these set layers the transiting boats will have no idea if they are underneath a patrol box or not thereby protecting any active patrol area from being targeted for a more concentrated search if someone somehow managed to leak their charts to an enemy.

For the Ohio class with their D5's this strategy is usually rendered moot as they can be sent almost anywhere in the world (short of the southern ocean, although it is possible to round the cape if the missiles aren't maxed out weight-wise with warheads). This is of course based upon Moscow being the target which was the gold standard during the cold war. If the target(s) are further south then the Southern Ocean comes into play as well. What this means is that they can be sent into the middle of nowhere where not even fishing vessels bother to go (and this is a huge percentage of the worlds oceans) to do their patrols if needed. However back in the days of the C3's and earlier where their ranges were considerably shorter they (by necessity) had to be in more crowded waters such as the Med for example, where the "Boxes" were placed under NATO control with only US officers in charge of designating all submarine operation areas just so they could protect their boomers operating areas from being revealed to foreign nationals.